Bitcoin's biggest early exchange was built on a marketplace for Magic: The Gathering cards 🃏

The domain mtgox.com started in 2007 as the "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange." Three years later it was rewritten into a bitcoin order book, and Mt. Gox opened for trading in July 2010 – sixteen years ago this month.

By 2013 it cleared an estimated 70% of the world's bitcoin volume. Then in February 2014, withdrawals froze and ~850,000 BTC were gone – worth hundreds of millions then, tens of billions today.

That's the day "not your keys, not your coins" stopped being a slogan and became a warning.

But holding your keys only answers who controls your assets while they sit still, not what happens when you move them. Swapping still usually means trusting some venue with your funds mid-trade. That's the gap we've spent eight years building under: wallet-to-wallet swaps, no on-platform balances.

16 years on, the question isn't whether BTC holds its value. It's whether you know who's holding yours while it moves.